MAKENA, Maui, Hawaii -- A visitor from Minnesota had a frightening encounter with a shark on Maui on Wednesday.

The shark encounter happened between the Molokini Crater and Makena off the Maui coast in the morning. Dan Lankheit, 57, was kayaking with a friend when he said a huge shark nudged his kayak and wouldn't stop following him.

Lankheit and his friend, Bob, were kayaking halfway between Molokini Crater and Makena when the shark appeared.

Lankheit said he turned around to check on Bob, who was trailing him by about 150 feet.

"I yelled to Bob, 'Great white,'" Lankheit said. "All I saw was the side of it, as he brushed up against me I saw his eye look at me. Then he just disappeared."

Lankheit kept paddling, hoping the 15- to 18-foot shark would tire and stop following him.

"I saw the dorsal fin following me and I thought, 'This is not a good thing,'" Lankheit said.

The shark pursued him for about 15 minutes. That's when a boat full of snorkelers from the Maui Dive Shop approached the kayakers.

"I started waving at 'em, 'Please come here,'" Lankheit said.

"When he waved us over, I could see there was a pretty large animal behind him," said Capt. Rae Eckert Stewart, of Maui Dive Shop. "He was just, you know, swimming along, looking at the kayak."

Stewart said the shark had a quite a large head and was swimming close to the surface.

"It didn't swim away right away, until I got close to it and then it didn't veer away from the kayaker. And then, I just gunned the engine a little bit to make some noise and it took off right away," Stewart said.

When the shark swam off, Stewart stopped her 36-foot boat and took the two men and their kayaks to shore.

Lankheit was a bit shaken, but Stewart said he was in good shape.

"He did a good thing. He stayed very calm. He was just paddling slowly," Stewart said.

The state land department has not determined what kind of shark it was, but it is investigating the encounter. The state also notified hotels and resorts on that stretch of beach.

45/70. A shark doesn't have any brain, so you shoot for the gills. We'd only have to exterminate three or four species of sharks and there'd never be another attack on a human. There'd still be 297 species of the fricking things for "scientists" who don't give a sh** about their fellow man to study.

Sharks don't have mates. Sharks just eat. It was trying do decide if the kayak was edible or not. No one has ever seen a shark mate, I don't think. It happens very deep underwater. They are very mysterious. Did you notice the dude in the snorkelers boat call it a very large "animal?" I've noticed them calling them "animals" lately, I suppose to try to get us thinking of them as just another animal with "rights" instead of as a killing machine.

My wife and I lived in Honolulu for a year in the early 1990s. One day we're at Kailua Beach park, swimming around, the little shark-food turtles bobbing. We went home, and read in the afternoon that they'd caught a 16 foot tiger (stupidest, hungriest, least people skittish) off that beach.

After that, each time I'd go into the water I'd lose my ability to breathe.

That monster in the pic looks about, oh, 12. Imagine a THIRD bigger than that.

I don't know. Neurosis? Or is it acceptable that I don't want to be consumed by a prehistoric animal?

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